95 Hertfordshire operating lottery system for school places
Debbie Andalo Thursday March 1, 2007 EducationGuardian.co.uk
As the row deepens over plans to introduce a lottery draw for secondary school places in Brighton next year, it emerged today that a similar random selection system has launched for children in Hertfordshire.
Hertfordshire county council has for the first time decided to introduce an electronic random ballot for admission this year to its single-sex schools, which traditionally have far more applicants than places.
Details of the lottery for school places in Hertfordshire comes a day after the controversy surrounding the decision by Brighton and Hove Council to allocate places for all its popular schools by a lottery system from 2008.
The move by Labour-controlled Brighton, which has divided parents in the Sussex seaside town, is being introduced in an attempt to bring an end to the practice of affluent parents being able to guarantee their child a place at successful school by buying a home within its catchment area.
The motive behind the decision by Conservative-controlled Hertfordshire is similar. The authority said it wanted a system that was fairer and to rule out the advantage parents have who live near to the school of their choice.
In a statement the county council said: "Our new system will provide all families in all priority areas a realistic chance of being given a place at a community single-sex school for the first time."
It added: "Although it's now harder to predict who will be given a place at a community single-sex school we now know that the system isn't loaded against people who don't happen to live in a certain corner of a town." Under the new system, Hertfordshire has kept the first four priority categories for a place the same as in previous years.
Top priority goes to looked after children or those with a special educational need. The next group are children who can prove they have a special medical or social reason to go to the school. A child with a brother or sister at the school qualifies are given third priority followed by children living within a defined catchment area.
But under new rules the council has decided that all remaining places are subject to a random lottery - regardless of where the children live.
The random allocation is not on offer to children who apply to mixed secondary schools in the county, where places continue to go on the basis of who lives nearest to the school.
Alan Gray is headteacher of Sandringham School in St Albans, a mixed co-educational school of 1,200 pupils, and a member of the St Albans and Harpenden Secondary Heads Association.
Applications to the school increased this year, he said. There were 180 places on offer this year and Sandringham received 213 applicants who put the school down as their first choice, compared with 187 last year.
But Mr Gray said it was impossible to say whether this was due to the new admissions system.
He said: "I believe very passionately that schools should serve their locality, and ideally I would like every local school to be a good school. I would hate the idea that somebody around the corner from my school failed to get in because of a lottery system and that the place went instead to somebody living five miles away.
"I think we need to wait and see whether this new admissions system is better than the previous one. Admission systems are however never perfect and there are always going to be winners and losers."
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